Ikea is developing a prototype of refugee shelter that is easy to put together, is insulated, has a solar light so people can cook/sew/do homework when it gets dark, and other simple yet practical features.

Ikea is getting feedback from refugees to improve upon the concept before they roll out the final design. They also plan to include a system of health care, education, and more so refugee families can not only get stabilized physically, but get all members of a family back on their feet in body/mind/spirit as quickly and respectfully as possible.

Tennessee is considering using lottery money to fully fund community college and technical school for all high school grads. Since cost is the biggest hurdle to getting a higher education, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam is on the right track to make higher education truly attainable – without all the hoops. Read more here.

What do you do if you’re a small tree chipping company and you don’t want to spend your money on dumping fees? What do you do if you’re a city planner trying to keep your landfills from filling up so fast? What do you do if you’re a homeowner who wants to do some sustainable and frugal landscaping pathways?

A new website in Portland Oregon solves this three way problem with chipdrop. You open an account and give your address, and whatever local tree chipping company has a load of chips they need to dump, they drive it to your house and dump it free in whatever location you mention. It helps the tree chipping companies because otherwise they’d have to pay dump fees. It helps the homeowner because you get free wood chips delivered to your door. It helps the city because it doesn’t get it’s landfills full of woodchips. Everybody wins.

We took advantage of this new service and created front and backyard pathways! Our load, we were told, was mostly douglas fir, so the whole yard smells wonderful, and it’s safe for our backyard free range chickens.

Even though I don’t have cancer, many of my friends have walked that road. So I thought reading this book would be enlightening.

In the book A Cancer Therapy, Dr. Max Gerson gives a foundation to understand how cancer can best be framed so that it can be cured. According to Dr. Gerson, studies show that cancer is a degenerative disease that takes a long time to develop. So when we find a lump, that is the culmination of years of degeneration, so much that the liver has finally grown too weak to fight the cancer. This book is a summary of thirty years of clinical experimentation by Dr. Max Gerson M.D. from the 1930’s-1950’s. He successfully took advanced cancer patients that traditional medicine had written off, and figured out how to heal the majority of them.

Dr. Gerson said that there is no magic pill that cures cancer. Yes, if you remove a large cancerous lump, sometimes that takes enough of the toxins out of the body where the liver can resume to clean the rest itself. But many times there is still so much sickness left in the bone, blood, and organs that’s just not showing signs yet, that the cancer ‘returns’. Dr. Gerson’s therapy was developed to treat not just the end symptoms (the tumors etc.) but the many causes – such as toxins from our pesticides and poor soil nutrition, using food and rest medicinally, detoxifying gently and slowly so the body doesn’t go into shock, etc.

This book was first published back in 1958. Today, as then, this research seems to be the last resort for those with advanced stage cancer who have been told they will die. So they get this book, find out about the Gerson Institute where they can get updated information on how to treat their disease at home, or go to a clinic where it can be treated for them. The regime is currently a little less intensive then what was written originally in the book, but it is still a slow, steady, time-consuming walk to healing. While the typical person prefers a faster more heroic rescue to a slow personal climb, if you’re willing (or desperate) to see results, this book is a fascinating read.

I found some healthy concepts I’d like to use/modify for use in my own life. The suggestions list of potassium rich veggies and fruits (many I already enjoy, some I want to buy and try out) look like a delicious and easy addition to my diet. And the detox ideas are ones I may explore in the future as well.